Though she's a veteran of seven Indy 500s, and a class winner at the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring, St. James's legacy, at 63, may be what she's doing now to help women racers.

C/D: When you went racing in 1973, you were a married, 26-year-old secretary and piano teacher from Ohio, living in Florida with a new husband. It was not an auspicious start.

LSJ: I went through an SCCA drivers’ school with my husband, and he saw how excited I was. We could only afford a Ford Pinto race car. Put in a roll bar and belts, and it was my street car during the week. My first race was at Palm Beach. I lost control and drove into the lake.

C/D: The lake?

LSJ: Yep, a lake next to the track. I got out before the water got too high. It was embarrassing; it was discouraging. My husband said, “Look, if you want it bad enough, we can figure it out. If not, now’s a real good time to give up.” I didn’t give up.

C/D: So you changed your name from Evelyn Cornwall to a more marketable one inspired by McMillan & Wife and went looking for a racing sponsor, which led to 15 years with Ford.

LSJ: There was an article in Car and Driver about the new Mercury Capri and how Ford wanted to provide opportunities for women because they wanted to sell the car to women. I wrote the Mercury general manager a letter. That was in 1978, and I didn’t get Ford as a sponsor until 1981, but that was the start.

C/D: Was there a woman driver to give you advice 30 years ago?

LSJ: Well, I did meet Janet Guthrie in 1981. Actually, I had raced with her at Sebring as a teammate in 1978 or 1979, but she didn’t remember that. I tried to enlist her help, but she had no interest. So my mentors were people like Al Holbert, Peter Gregg, Brian Redman.

C/D: On the other side, how many people worked to make you feel unwelcome?

LSJ: Well, there were lots of those, but I never listened to them. I mean, Jack Roush—I was ready to kill him a couple of times.

C/D: You made your name in sports cars, but what you really wanted to drive was Indy cars, though you just didn’t know it.

LSJ: I was getting far along in my career, and I knew I wanted to drive an Indy car before my world came to an end. It was Dick Simon who gave me a shot. He called me and said, “You’ve been bugging me about driving an Indy car—be at Memphis tomorrow.” So I went to Memphis, and I drove the whole day. I was in heaven. I made up my mind on the spot that I didn’t want to do sports cars anymore, though staying there probably would have been the best career move. But I got out of that Indy car, and I thought, “If I’ve got to climb a mountain, this is the mountain I’m gonna climb.” I’d never driven an open-wheel car. That first Indy 500 was my first oval-track race and my second open-wheel race.

C/D: You were already 45 when you made your first Indy 500, but you did well, finishing 11th. Which was more satisfying—that race, or your last one in 2000 after being bumped out of the lineup by faster qualifiers at Indy for the two years prior?

LSJ: To get to Indy—and win rookie of the year—was so satisfying. But so was being able to go back when everyone had written me off—at 53, I was by far the oldest driver in the race. That felt good. To me, the point was that it is not always the significance of the race, it’s how well I did given the circumstances. I didn’t have that many wins in my career. But to take the checkered flag at Indy, when you know you couldn’t have done any better than you did, those are the ones you really value.

C/D: You had some spectacular crashes. The one at Riverside, where Doc Bundy ran your IMSA GTP car into the wall and you landed upside-down and on fire . . .

LSJ: None of them made me think that this is something I don’t want to do anymore. The crashes only made me dig deeper.

C/D: You’ve graduated about 250 female drivers from your Complete Driver Academy since 1994, and that includes Sarah Fisher, Danica Patrick, Melanie Troxel, and Liz Halliday. What does it take to be accepted as a candidate?

LSJ: I’m mostly looking at 12- to 14-year-olds. If they don’t figure out their career path in those first few years, that window of opportunity has passed.